This question is prob. not ITIL related but here it goes anyway:
We're a SD giving support to a compagny of more then 10.000 employees.

Like every other SD we have certain peak hours where we must have enough recources for not having a large amount of lost call's.
Our SD is devided is several groups , each working within theire own knowledge domain.some groups have less work then others due to their specific tasks (Monitoring , 2nd line, ....).

are there any creative ideas to intergrate these teams within the call taking procedure?
Or is hiring more resources the best thing to do?
Problem is that the cost for these extra resources is not always worth it because in the non peak hours there's simply to much people with nothing to do.

I know that each compagny has to find this out for itself but I'm just wondering how other SD's managed this problem.

When I ran a SD, the SD was follow the sun.... The primary team would take the calls (London) while the secondary woudl deal with the tickets after the primary created them. The phone numbers would roll over on a 12 hour basis so none would be the wiser

well not true... when they heard hawaiian music and american voices - they knew the SD was in Honolulu. The english and crappy hold music was london

What are the number of call you get per hour . Do stats like that

if you are a single country office, your prime time is 0800 to 1800._________________John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

key to this is to invest the money (if any) in a decent knowledge base. You don't need a bells and whistles KB but somehting that allows you create knowledge content and be able to find it easily. You also need to invest time and effort in a proces to support the identification, gathering, creating and upkeep / revision of knowledge otherwise you won't get for.

This will bridge the gap between the domains and in particular help to provide decent and relevant knowledge to those supporting in the less peak times.

If you under take this it does take time but the rewards are far reaching and over time._________________Mark O'Loughlin
ITSM / ITIL Consultant

Knowledge is indeed very important and I'm trying to work on a system that traces the keywords , procedures and flows in a simple way.
If you expand your knowledge towards the all the teams they become all high skilled agents who can take every call and can reach out specific solutions towards the enduser.

Be sure to come up with a Knowledge Managemet method and process first to ensure that you can get the maximun benefit from early on. You will need to define "Knowledge Manager" roles or similar to encourage the transfer and recording of knowledge._________________Mark O'Loughlin
ITSM / ITIL Consultant

Knowledge mnagement sounds fantastic. We have a similar setup where we have come up with a dynamic online knowledgebase which is very handy for the agents taking calls. The agents have been extended the capability of adding the approved KB entries. Am I doing some kind of knowledge management by doing so ?